Greek Fascists Set to Become Part of New Provisional Government

COMMENT: In the wake of the eco­nomic and polit­i­cal tur­moil sweep­ing Europe as a result of the Euro­zone debt cri­sis, Greece has formed a new coali­tion gov­ern­ment, one of whose par­tic­i­pants is the LAOS party.

Reported to have played a major role in the for­ma­tion of the new pro­vi­sional gov­ern­ment and pos­si­bly in line for a min­is­te­r­ial post, LAOS party leader George Karatzaferis has voiced a num­ber of anti-Semitic state­ments, cast­ing doubt on the real­ity of the Holo­caust and inti­mat­ing that Jews were behind the 9/11 attack.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if the global finan­cial cri­sis feeds anti-Semitic pol­i­tics and sen­ti­ment, with the old saw about the Jews run­ning the banks gain­ing new life in cer­tain circles.

EXCERPT: . . . Greek media reported Thurs­day that Karatzaferis played a cen­tral role in the steps that led to the estab­lish­ment of a gov­ern­ment that would try to nav­i­gate Greece out of its debt cri­sis by imple­ment­ing a Euro­pean finan­cial plan. The reports also said he was set to be part of the new government.

Reports claim that in the last few years, Karatzaferis made a long line of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli state­ments. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, the politi­cian posed the ques­tion “why were all the Jews warned not to come to work that day?” before the Greek parliament.

On a tele­vised debate with Israel’s ambas­sador to Greece he said: “Lets talk about all these tales of Auschwitz and Dachau”; in 2002 dur­ing a par­lia­ment ses­sion he asked the then Greek prime min­is­ter: “Is it true that your daugh­ter secretly mar­ried a Jew?”; and dur­ing Oper­a­tion Cast Lead in 2008, Karatzaferis said that the IDF was act­ing “with sav­age bru­tal­ity only seen in Hitler’s time towards help­less people.”

Greek media reported that LAOS, the Pop­u­lar Ortho­dox Rally party — an extreme right party estab­lished by Karatzaferis in 2000 with 7% of the vote in the last elec­tions — will most likely be a part­ner in the national unity government.

They will join the gov­ern­ment together with the left-wing PASOK party which has been in power until only recently, and the right-wing New Democ­racy party. It was claimed that Karatzaferis may even take up a role as a minister. . . .

Discussion

9 comments for “Greek Fascists Set to Become Part of New Provisional Government”

If this fully comes to pass.......I am going to be seri­ously con­cerned about the future of Greece. Maybe the peo­ple will wake up soon, but maybe they won’t.......and per­haps some of the decent anti-fascist fac­tions of Anony­mous could come to the aid of the peo­ple as well, by expos­ing Karatzaferis for what he is, etc. ?

LONDON — The euro zone was unrav­el­ing, just as he had long pre­dicted, yet Bernard Con­nolly, Europe’s most per­sis­tent prophet of doom, still faced a skep­ti­cal audience.

“The cur­rent pol­icy of lend­ing plus aus­ter­ity will lead to social unrest,” Mr. Con­nolly told investors and pol­icy mak­ers at a con­fer­ence held this spring in Los Ange­les by the Milken Insti­tute, argu­ing the case that Greece, Italy, Por­tu­gal and Spain could not sim­ply cut their way to recovery.

“And one should not for­get that of the four coun­tries we are talk­ing about, all have had civil wars, fas­cist dic­ta­tor­ships and rev­o­lu­tions. That is his­tory,” he con­cluded, his voice ris­ing above the chor­tles and gasps com­ing from the audi­ence and the Euro­peans on his panel. “And that is the future if this malig­nant lunacy of mon­e­tary union is pur­sued and crushes these coun­tries into the ground.”

Mr. Con­nolly has been warn­ing for years that Europe was head­ing for dis­as­ter. As an E.U. econ­o­mist in the early 1990s, he helped design the com­mon currency’s frame­work, but he was later dis­missed after he expressed turn­coat views. In 1998, just months before the euro’s intro­duc­tion, he pre­dicted that at least one of Europe’s weak­est coun­tries would face a ris­ing bud­get deficit, a shrink­ing econ­omy and a “down­ward spi­ral from which there is no escape unaided. When that hap­pens, the coun­try con­cerned will be faced with a risk of sov­er­eign default.”

...

This arti­cle also includes some inter­est­ing back­ground info regard­ing the expec­ta­tions by some of AIG’s “Finan­cial Prod­ucts” unit (the unit that blew up AIG) dur­ing the lead up to AIG’s Sep­tem­ber 2008 implosion...

...Mr. Con­nolly, who used to work for AIG Finan­cial Prod­ucts, the bank­ing arm of the giant insur­ance com­pany Amer­i­can Inter­na­tional Group, until it went into gov­ern­ment receiver­ship, now oper­ates out of a non­de­script office in New York, where he is said to pound out as much as 20,000 words of analy­sis a week.
...
The ori­gins of that fear as well as the anger and pas­sion that drive him date to 1995, when he took a leave from his job to write “The Rot­ten Heart of Europe,” an exco­ri­at­ing his­tory of the fail­ure of the euro’s pre­de­ces­sor, the Euro­pean Exchange Rate Mechanism.

In Britain, where sus­pi­cions of com­mon Euro­pean eco­nomic pol­icy ran very high, the book was a hit for its attacks on the archi­tects of the Euro­pean com­mon cur­rency, includ­ing Jacques Delors, the for­mer head of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, and Jean-Claude Trichet, the French finance offi­cial who would go on to run the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank for eight years.

The book was greeted less enthu­si­as­ti­cally in Brus­sels; Mr. Con­nolly was told not to return from leave to reclaim his posi­tion. More­over, he was the sub­ject of an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion into whether he had dis­closed any pro­pri­etary infor­ma­tion in his book. Inves­ti­ga­tors found that he had not.

In 2005, while work­ing at A.I.G. and at a time when Greek, Por­tuguese and Irish bonds were trad­ing at rates barely higher than Germany’s, Mr. Con­nolly per­suaded a small group of hedge funds and inde­pen­dent investors to bet on a euro zone crack-up

They did so by buy­ing the credit-default swaps of what he saw as the most vul­ner­a­ble Euro­pean coun­tries. When fears that those coun­tries would default took off in 2008 and 2009, send­ing the val­ues of those swaps sky­ward, they were able to sell out — reap­ing large profits.

“It took a while, but we finally were able to mon­e­tize Bernard’s views on Europe,” said James Aitken, who worked with him at A.I.G. and described his job then as trans­lat­ing Mr. Connolly’s arcane mus­ings into actual invest­ment strate­gies.
...

“With all the pro­pa­ganda we’ve been fed about Greece’s new “aus­ter­ity” gov­ern­ment being staffed by non-ideological “tech­nocrats,” it may come as a sur­prise that fas­cists are now con­sid­ered “tech­nocrats” to the main­stream media and West­ern bank­ing inter­ests. Then again, his­tory shows that fas­cists have always been favored by the 1-percenters to deliver the aus­ter­ity medicine.

This rather dis­turb­ing def­i­n­i­tion of what counts as “non-ideological” or “tech­no­cratic” in 2011 is some­thing most folks are try­ing hard to ignore, which might explain why there’s been almost noth­ing about how Greece’s new EU-imposed aus­ter­ity gov­ern­ment includes neo-Nazis from the LAOS Party (LAOS is the acronym for Greece’s fas­cist polit­i­cal party, not the South­east Asian paradise).”

“That’s where we are today. Greece drown­ing in debt, its democ­racy bro­ken, and despite fight­ing the Nazis in World War Two, and tak­ing back democ­racy from a fas­cist junta in 1974–in the end, it was the EU and the West­ern banks that put a guy like Makis “Ham­mer” Voridis, the guy who patrolled his law school with a makeshift ax, in power, admin­is­ter­ing banker-pain.”

See the guy in the photo there [see web­site for photo], dan­gling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Min­is­ter of Infra­struc­ture, Trans­port and Net­works” Makis Voridis [pho­tographed] back in the 1980s, when he led a fas­cist stu­dent group called “Stu­dent Alter­na­tive” at the Uni­ver­sity of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Min­is­ter Voridis, dressed like some Kaja­goo­goo Nazi, is caught on cam­era patrolling the cam­pus with his fel­low fas­cists, hunt­ing for sus­pected left­ist stu­dents to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Asso­ci­a­tion of Stu­dents for tak­ing part in vio­lent attacks on non-fascist law students.

With all the pro­pa­ganda we’ve been fed about Greece’s new “aus­ter­ity” gov­ern­ment being staffed by non-ideological “tech­nocrats,” it may come as a sur­prise that fas­cists are now con­sid­ered “tech­nocrats” to the main­stream media and West­ern bank­ing inter­ests. Then again, his­tory shows that fas­cists have always been favored by the 1-percenters to deliver the aus­ter­ity medicine.

This rather dis­turb­ing def­i­n­i­tion of what counts as “non-ideological” or “tech­no­cratic” in 2011 is some­thing most folks are try­ing hard to ignore, which might explain why there’s been almost noth­ing about how Greece’s new EU-imposed aus­ter­ity gov­ern­ment includes neo-Nazis from the LAOS Party (LAOS is the acronym for Greece’s fas­cist polit­i­cal party, not the South­east Asian paradise).

Which brings me back to the new Min­is­ter of Infra­struc­ture, Makis Voridis. Before he was an ax-wielding law stu­dent, Voridis led another fas­cist youth group that sup­ported the jailed leader of Greece’s 1967 mil­i­tary coup. Greece has been down this fas­cism route before, all under the guise of sav­ing the nation and com­plaints about alleged par­lia­men­tary weak­ness. In 1967, the mil­i­tary over­threw democ­racy, imposed a fas­cist junta, jailed and tor­tured sus­pected left­ist dis­si­dents, and ran the coun­try into the ground until the junta was over­thrown by pop­u­lar protest in 1974.

That mil­i­tary junta—and the United States sup­port for it (for which Clin­ton apol­o­gized in 1999)—is a raw and painful mem­ory for Greeks. Most Greeks, any­way. As far as today’s Infra­struc­ture Min­is­ter, Makis Voridis, was con­cerned, the only bad thing about the junta was that it was over­thrown by democ­racy demon­stra­tors. A fas­cist party was set up in the early 1980s in sup­port of the jailed coup leader, and Voridis headed up that party’s youth wing. That’s when he earned the nick­name “Ham­mer.” You can prob­a­bly guess by now why Greece’s Infra­struc­ture Min­is­ter was given the nick­name “Ham­mer”: Voridis’s favorite sport was hunt­ing down left­ist youths and beat­ing them with, yes, a hammer.

After the ham­mer, he grad­u­ated to law school– and the ax; was expelled from law school; and worked his way up the adult world of Greek fas­cist pol­i­tics, his ax tucked under the bed some­where. In 1994, Voridis helped found a new far-right party, The Hel­lenic Front. In 2004’s elec­tions, Voridis’s “Hel­lenic Front Party” formed a bloc with the neo-Nazi “Front Party,” headed by Greece’s most noto­ri­ous Holo­caust denier, Kon­stan­ti­nos Ple­vis, a for­mer fas­cist ter­ror­ist whose book, “Jews: The Whole Truth,” praised Adolph Hitler and called for the exter­mi­na­tion of Jews. Ple­vis was charged and found guilty of “incit­ing racial hatred” in 2007, but his sen­tence was over­turned on appeal in 2009.

By that time, Makis “Ham­mer” Voridis had traded up in the world of Greek fas­cism, merg­ing his Hel­lenic Front Party into the far-right LAOS party, an umbrella party for all sorts of neo-Nazi and far-right polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions. LAOS was founded by another rav­ing anti-Semite, Gior­gos Karatzeferis—nicknamed “KaratzaFührer” in Greece for alleg­ing that the Holo­caust and Auschwitz are Jew­ish “myths,” and say­ing that Jews have “no legit­i­macy to speak in Greece.” The Anti-Defamation League is going bal­lis­tic about it; for some rea­son, the media hasn’t taken notice, except in Israel.

Funny thing is, as far as LAOS party leader “KaratzaFührer” was con­cerned, while he liked Makis “Ham­mer” Voridis just as much as the next neo-Nazi, he was wor­ried about what the pub­lic might think of putting “Ham­mer” up for elec­tions on the LAOS party list. Here is LAOS party leader Karatze­feris explain­ing why to a news­pa­per last year (big HT to the Greek site “When The Cri­sis Hits The Fan” for this and much more):

Gioro­gos Karatzaferis: “I was sim­ply afraid that Voridis has a his­tory which I have man­aged to cover after con­sid­er­able effort…”

Chris­tos Machairas (jour­nal­ist): “What exactly do you mean by “history”?”

Gior­gos Karatzaferis: “About his rela­tion with Jean Marie Le Pen, the axes and all the rest. I am just think­ing that sud­denly, on the 30th of Octo­ber (i.e. a bit before the local elec­tions) some guy from New Democ­racy or from Tsipras’ team (i.e. SYRIZA left­ist party) can throw a video on the air and drag me explain­ing about all these things.”

See, that’s the prob­lem with elec­tions, ref­er­en­dums, democ­racy and the rest: You don’t really know just how qual­i­fied and tech­no­cratic a guy like Makis “Ham­mer” Vordis is, which is why it’s such a good thing that the banks instructed the EU to impose “Ham­mer” on Greece. To deliver some pain. It’s for their own good.

No pain (for the 99%), no gain (for the 1%).

And that is how today, thanks to the EU and the bank­ing inter­ests that con­trol it, Makis “Ham­mer” Voridis is the new Infra­struc­ture Minister.

Which brings me back to the his­tory of Greece’s coups, and the talk of coups today. Read­ers who fol­low our “What You Should Know” sec­tion have been read­ing for months now about all sorts of strange things going on in Greece’s mil­i­tary, cul­mi­nat­ing with (now ex-) Prime Minister’s Papandreou’s deci­sion to fire his entire mil­i­tary lead­er­ship. He fired them on Novem­ber 1, the same day that he announced that he was putting the EU aus­ter­ity pro­gram to a demo­c­ra­tic ref­er­en­dum vote. Here is an account of the firings:

“... Mean­while, in a devel­op­ment that has stoked fears of a poten­tial mil­i­tary coup in the coun­try, Papan­dreou on Tues­day also fired the entire high com­mand of the armed forces along with some dozen other senior offi­cers and replaced them with fig­ures believed to be more sup­port­ive of the cur­rent polit­i­cal leadership.

“... The heads of the country’s gen­eral staff, army, navy and air force were all dis­missed fol­low­ing the meet­ing of the Gov­ern­ment Coun­cil for For­eign Affairs and Defence, the supreme decision-making body on national defense.

“... The min­istry main­tains that the change in the mil­i­tary high com­mand had long been sched­uled. But such reshuf­fles, which take place every two to three years, do not nor­mally result in the dis­missal of the entire leadership...”

That came dur­ing a month of bizarre mass weapons pur­chases by the Greek mil­i­tary, with the cred­i­tor nations—France and the US—as the weapons sell­ers: In early Octo­ber, we learned that the US was tak­ing a breather from push­ing aus­ter­ity and bash­ing lazy Greek pub­lic employ­ees to extend a new line of credit to Greece’s military:

“... Accord­ing to infor­ma­tion of the “Hel­lenic Defence & Tech­nol­ogy” mag­a­zine, the U.S. author­i­ties approved to grant 400 M1A1 Abrams tanks to the Greek Army, which will include options between sim­ple refur­bish­ment – worth tens of mil­lions dol­lars for all the tanks– and upgrad­ing to a higher level of oper­a­tional capa­bil­ity, with a higher cor­re­spond­ing cost. The rel­a­tive Let­ter of Offer and Accep­tance (LOA) is expected soon.

“... Also accord­ing to exclu­sive infor­ma­tion of the” Hel­lenic Defence & Tech­nol­ogy” mag­a­zine, a Price and Avail­abil­ity let­ter was sent to U.S. author­i­ties regard­ing 20 AAV7A1 and a low cost upgrade pro­gram for them. This is the first step to cover an oper­a­tional require­ment for 75–100 vehicles....”

A cou­ple of weeks later, France extended fresh lines of credit to the same mil­i­tary for desperately-needed stealth bat­tle­ships, leav­ing Ger­many feel­ing angry and left out, accord­ing to Der Spiegel:

“A huge arms deal is threat­en­ing to put French-German rela­tions under strain. Accord­ing to infor­ma­tion obtained by SPIEGEL, France wants to deliver two to four new frigates to the Greek navy and to allow the highly indebted nation to post­pone pay­ment of the €300 mil­lion ($412 mil­lion) pur­chase price per ship for the next five years.

“... Under the deal, Greece will have the option of pay­ing up after five years, with a sig­nif­i­cant dis­count of €100 mil­lion, or return­ing them to the French navy. The “stealth” frigates are designed to avoid detec­tion by enemy radar and are built by state-owned French defense com­pany DCNS.

“... The deal is being crit­i­cized by Ger­man rivals that have been com­pet­ing for the con­tract for years.”

That last part says it all: What pissed off the Ger­mans wasn’t the profli­gacy, but los­ing out in a con­tract they’d been com­pet­ing for. What this shows, again, is the lie of “aus­ter­ity”: They pre­tend that Greece is too deeply in debt to bor­row another penny, yet think noth­ing of lend­ing a few hun­dred mil­lion to the military.

Look­ing back at the last-minute maneu­vers, it seems pretty clear that Papandreou’s deci­sion to fire all the mil­i­tary lead­ers on the day he announced his ref­er­en­dum on austerity—his attempt to coun­ter­bal­ance West­ern banker power and local mil­i­tary power with demo­c­ra­tic peo­ple power–was essen­tially an impe­ri­al­ist power-struggle in an uppity colony, whose inhab­i­tants are seen as lit­tle more than sources of extrac­tion for banker prof­its. So we have the cred­i­tor nations try­ing to buy off the mil­i­tary as Banker D(efault)-Day approaches, and Papan­dreou try­ing to counter that by both bend­ing to their will, real­iz­ing he’s through, and try­ing to save him­self by empow­er­ing the peo­ple in his coun­try. But Papan­dreou was far too weak and far too com­pro­mised. Ulti­mately he was no match; he never had a chance. And the pop­u­lar will of Greece’s cit­i­zens is barely an afterthought.

This is how bankers deal with banana republics; it’s how they ran their colonies. Take care of the mil­i­tary, give them gifts and get them in your pocket. The peo­ple only exist to be extracted. And when they squeal, char­ac­ter­ize them the way the Brits char­ac­ter­ized the Irish dur­ing the Great Famine: lazy, prof­li­gate, it’s all their own fault, what they need is more painful med­i­cine and a swift kick in the ass…for their own good, of course.

And just in case it wasn’t clear to every­one, Forbes mag­a­zine came out in favor of a coup. Here is how one Greek colum­nist reported it:

“Instead of pour­ing euros down the drain, it would be much wiser for Ger­many to spon­sor a mil­i­tary coup and solve the prob­lem that way.”

No, this extract is not from a fas­cist blog. It is from Forbes mag­a­zine and it’s just another one of the provoca­tive arti­cles that fol­low this insane ongo­ing anti-Greece cam­paign of inter­na­tional media.

In the end, the bankers and the West got their coup. And they didn’t need an ugly mil­i­tary spec­ta­cle to make it hap­pen. Papan­dreou was over­thrown, the ref­er­en­dum was with­drawn, an aus­ter­ity regime put in place to carry out the bankers’ demands, with­out democ­racy get­ting in the way. Nice ‘n’ clean.

Not only did the West get its coup, but fas­cists like Makis “Ham­mer” Voridis got what they’ve been strug­gling for all their lives: Power, and vin­di­ca­tion for far-right nation­al­ism over democracy.

That’s where we are today. Greece drown­ing in debt, its democ­racy bro­ken, and despite fight­ing the Nazis in World War Two, and tak­ing back democ­racy from a fas­cist junta in 1974–in the end, it was the EU and the West­ern banks that put a guy like Makis “Ham­mer” Voridis, the guy who patrolled his law school with a makeshift ax, in power, admin­is­ter­ing banker-pain.

The impli­ca­tions of the EU and bankers forc­ing Greece, the birth­place of democ­racy, to can­cel a pop­u­lar plebiscite as “irre­spon­si­ble,” forc­ing instead an aus­ter­ity regime com­posed partly of neo-Nazis fas­cists to admin­is­ter more “pain”–is some­thing that should frighten the shit out of everyone.

Because like it or not, we’re all in the same cross-hairs of the same bank­ing inter­ests, and we’re all going to face it again and again.

With fas­cists get­ting installed in lead­er­ship posi­tions set to becom­ing a “new nor­mal”, here’s an arti­cle from 2001 about a 1995 secret meet­ing that reminds us of the fas­cist pres­ences on the anti-EU/eurozone side of the farce debate. Heads they win. Tails you lose:

TORY leader Ian Dun­can Smith faced a fresh row over racism last night after it emerged he held a secret Com­mons meet­ing with a lead­ing French fascist.

He was among a group of top Tories who agreed to talk to mem­bers of the French National Front, which cam­paigns for black Africans to be expelled from the country.

After the meet­ing, held behind closed doors in a pri­vate office, Mr Dun­can Smith also had drinks in a Palace Of West­min­ster bar with lead­ing French National Front politi­cian Bruno Gollnisch.

The meet­ings were set up by the extreme right-wing West­ern Goals Insti­tute, a shad­owy group which once arranged for French NF leader Jean-Marie le Pen to address a fringe meet­ing at the Tory Party’s annual conference.

...

The insti­tute also arranged for Alessan­dra Mus­solini, the fascist-sympathising grand­daugh­ter of Italy’s wartime leader, to attend another fringe meeting.

It was also attended by at least five other senior Tories includ­ing for­mer Chan­cel­lor Nor­man Lam­ont, lead­er­ship chal­lenger John Red­wood, and back­benchers Richard Body, Paul Mar­land and John Sweeney.

Details of the meet­ings, in Octo­ber 1995, were kept secret at the time.

But in Paris yes­ter­day French NF sec­re­tary Mr Goll­nisch — who is also a Euro-MP and has his own inter­net web­site for his head­quar­ters town of Lyon, said: “I came to Lon­don with other mem­bers of the French National Front to meet mem­bers of the British Con­ser­v­a­tive Party who were sym­pa­thetic to our views.

“The meet­ings were to hold an exchange of views on Europe.

“We, like the Con­ser­v­a­tive MPs we met, are strongly opposed to the dis­ap­pear­ance of national iden­ti­ties under a mon­strous Euro­pean super-state.

...

Since tak­ing over the Tory lead­er­ship ear­lier this year, Mr Dun­can Smith has been plagued by the emer­gence of past links with right-wing groups.

He was forced to sack a mem­ber of his cam­paign team who was unmasked as a British National Party sym­pa­thiser. In an effort to present a mod­er­ate, voter-friendly face to the pub­lic he has also expelled the Mon­day Club — which favours repa­tri­a­tion for immi­grants — from the Party.

The West­ern Goals Insti­tute is even more extreme. One of its for­mer pres­i­dents, Clive Derby-Lewis, was con­victed of involve­ment in the mur­der of Chris Hani, a black South African activist. His pre­de­ces­sor was Sal­vadorean death squad leader Major Roberto D’Aubuisson.

Mr Dun­can Smith was last night accused by one of his own party mem­bers of “gross hypocrisy” for remov­ing right-wingers from key posts.

...

It’s also impor­tant to remem­ber that pro/anti-EU or what­ever, fas­cists of all stripes love a good old fash­ioned finan­cial cri­sis. Big money has always been a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence in the back­ground of any fas­cist move­ment and that’s who wins in a cri­sis (and then there’s the political/social value of destroy­ing the econ­omy). So, to some extent, eco­nomic crises are the rai­son d’etre of fas­cists move­ments. That’s part of what makes the pro­posed treaty changes to the EU so fas­ci­nat­ing: the auto­matic tax-increases/budget-cuts that are being pro­posed will put a con­sti­tu­tion guar­an­tee in place for self-reinforcing eco­nomic crises. And if the the euro­zone doesn’t take the plunge and accept changes, it’s being set up to be one gigan­tic clus­ter­fuck cri­sis the whole world. Heads they win, tails we all lose.

Iain Dun­can Smith has said tack­ling child poverty by boost­ing fam­ily income through ben­e­fits is a nar­row approach which “looks set to have failed”.

The work and pen­sions sec­re­tary said there were prob­lems with offi­cially clas­si­fy­ing child poverty as a fam­ily on 60% or less than the median income.

It cre­ated per­verse incen­tives to lift peo­ple just over the mark, he said.

Offi­cial fig­ures pub­lished on Tues­day sug­gest child poverty is set to swell by 100,000 over the next few years.

The pre­vi­ous Labour gov­ern­ment intro­duced a Child Poverty Act, cre­at­ing a legally bind­ing require­ment for the gov­ern­ment to end child poverty by 2020.

Offi­cial fig­ures sug­gest 2.8m chil­dren are liv­ing in poverty.

‘Incon­ceiv­able’

This week the Insti­tute for Fis­cal Stud­ies said it remained “incon­ceiv­able” that the gov­ern­ment would hit the 2020 target.

Mr Dun­can Smith made his com­ments in a speech in cen­tral Lon­don, argu­ing that the way child poverty was mea­sured and tack­led had proved “hugely expen­sive” and looked likely to fail.

He said that while ben­e­fits would always play a “vital role” for some, such as peo­ple with seri­ous dis­abil­i­ties, increased income did not always mean “increased wellbeing”.

...

“Income through ben­e­fits main­tain peo­ple on a low income, whereas income gained through work can trans­form lives,” he said.

...

Sec­re­tary of Work and Pen­sions. Well done Mr. Smith. So just out curios­ity, was there a shad­owy meet­ing between Ian Dun­can Smith and Newt last month to dis­cuss labor law reform ideas or is this just a coin­ci­dence?